Steve Jobs interview from 1983 uncovered with spot-on predictions for the future

From a casette tape recovered this week by Marcel Brown of Steve Jobs speaking at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen comes an interview that reveals several baffling predictions from the Apple co-founder. It was John Celuch of Inland Design who possessed this tape up until just recently, each of the attendees of the speech receiving said speech (and Q and A) on the tape you see here – rather lovely, isn’t it? This tape has the number 20 on it, this leading us to believe that there may have been a limited amount of these tapes created – but it’s moot now as the internet spreads the love in a wide way.

Below you’re going to see a SoundCloud presentation of the audio from this interview with Steve Jobs. It’s interesting to note that this conference also had a strange Time Capsule burying ceremony that Jobs contributed to – we’re not yet aware of what’s happened to the capsule, but it’s certainly going to be interesting when the revelation is made. Back when this recording was made there was no Apple Macintosh, the Apple II series was the top computer on the market, and Jobs would leave Apple just 3 years later to start NeXT. The Apple Lisa was their next big thing.

Jobs speaks on voice recognition, early networking, and predicts that it’d be 5 years before office networking would be working at a usable level and 10 to 15 years before home networking would be solved. He predicts that we’d be having portable computers that’d be able to pick up information anywhere with radio links and that in a few years people would be spending more time with their personal computers than with their automobiles. Jobs also drops a lovely bit of foresight on Apple’s strategy at the time.”

“[Apple’s strategy is to] put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes.” – Jobs

He added that these computers would connect via “radio link” so people would not have to hook up to anything to communicate with “larger databases” and computers everywhere. He speaks about how the record industry will change as the software industry changes, removing the need for brick-and-mortar stores altogether. Imagine that!